NVIDIA Releases VR Funhouse and Ansel Virtual Camera

Last week, the word was out the VR Funhouse, a game created by NVIDIA would make its way to Steam, for free. It is officially out now. VR Funhouse is a compilation of relatively simple, but fun, games. The app was demonstrated to a (relatively) small audience at various tradeshows, including Computex 2016, but now the general public can finally get its hands on it – at least for those who have a Pascal-based GPU, like the GeForce GTX 1080.

The VR industry gets something out of it too: NVIDIA will release the source code of the game so that developers worldwide can look at how things work, and adopt the same techniques.

The move is not surprising because VR Funhouse uses NVIDIA libraries that the company is actively promoting such as VR PhysX, VRWorks Audio, Hairworks, NVIDIA Flow and NVIDIA Flex, a GPU-accelerated particle library that is seeing action in a real game for the first time.

I played with all the games in the VR Funhouse, and I found them to be of good quality. Many of them could be an excellent introduction to VR for newbies, but it’s also fun for a quick play.

There’s particular attention to details and to have the user completely immersed (vision, touch, sound). You can push things around gently or knock them over. Pretty much every object interacts with others, and even the particles will be driven by a fluid simulation in the air. Just about everything is driven by physics.

The recommended specs for the VR Funhouse is. Warning, it is not cheap:

• Low: Core i7 4790 + GeForce GTX 1060
• Medium: Core i7 5930K + GeForce GTX 1080
• High: Core i7 5930K + GeForce GTX 1080 + GTX 980Ti & above for PhysX

Ansel makes it debuts

At the same time, the Ansel virtual camera will be released in today’s NVIDIA driver update that can be download on NVIDIA’s site or updated using the GeForce Experience app, which is the simple way of doing it.

The first game to be compatible with Ansel is Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. Normally, the game itself has been patched with Ansel support, and the files have already been distributed during a previous update. So, as soon as the new graphics driver is installed, you can use the virtual camera to capture screenshots in never-seen-before locations.

A game update was necessary because Ansel uses the in-game camera, so there need to be some minor changes in the game’s code. In general, it’s not that much work for the game programmers, so expect more games to follow.

Talking about upcoming games supporting Ansel, we know that Witcher 3 will be the next on the list, followed at some point by: The Division, The Witness, Paragon, No Man’s Sky, Unreal Tournament. And since Mirror’s Edge runs on the Frostbyte engine, you can imagine which titles may follow…

You can read out initial NVIDIA Ansel coverage for more details, or head to its official page, but photos captured with Ansel in 360 VR (stereo) can be viewed with the NVIDIA VR Viewer.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Gaming
Tags: NVIDIA, Virtual Reality (VR)